124 pgs. full color | $19.99 paperback | W / A: Peter Bagge
This month Fantagraphics released Hate Revisited, a complete collection of the 2024 comic series by cartoonist Peter Bagge. Those four issues were the first new stories published of the legendary alternative comic, starring Gen X stand-in Buddy Bradley, since the Annual series went on hiatus way back in 2011. Revisiting Hate in 2025 is certainly a different experience now than it was when the original series debuted in spring of 1990. Take the series name as a perfect example: Hate was a bold title back then, but nothing out of the ordinary for the grunge-era lexicon in which similar terms like “loser,” “slacker,” “whatever,” and “No Duh” were all just a common part of youth culture. A popular t-shirt slogan for the comic series cheekily stated “I like Hate, and I Hate everything else,” capturing the spirit of the title’s harmless, nonchalant “ugh.” Now, in the MAGA era, when internet trolls and AI bots spam the world wide web with endless threads of actual vile hate speech, readers might see the title Hate mixed in on the comic racks and be somewhat reluctant to revisit or discover the famous series.
Of course, Peter Bagge defuses this tension by making the cover of the first issue of Hate Revisited as audacious as possible; Buddy, adorning a red MAGA hat, is comically slammed in the head with a Black Lives Matter sign by his ex-girlfriend, Val. If you can judge anything by its cover, you’ll quickly recognize this iconic alt-comic is going to be as divisive as ever in 2025—but you’re still in for tons of laughs, too.
At first glance, Buddy Bradley is an unlikely avatar for Trumpism. Yet, as the New York Times recently posited, Gen X (those born between 1965 and 1980) took a huge swing toward supporting the GOP in the 2024 presidential election and helped return Trump to the White House. Long-time Hate readers might also remember that Buddy would occasionally listen to blowhard Rush Limbaugh back in the ‘90s, though only for an ironic lark. Hate Revisited examines the question: Could someone like Buddy really be responsible for voting for such a reckless candidate?
Buddy’s wife, Lisa, confronts him in the first issue of Hate Revisited, asking directly if he voted for Trump.
He responds in his typical sardonic fashion: “Give me some credit, woman. I voted for a write-in candidate.”
Who was that write-in candidate, Lisa inquires further?
Buddy retorts, “Remember the guy who kept saying ‘the rent is too damn high?’ I just wrote ‘Rent too high guy…They’ll figure it out.’” For better or worse, Buddy remained a genuine slacker all these years later.
Buddy’s extended family members (all entertaining fixtures of the series) fare far worse. Buddy’s mom, now living alone in a retirement community in New Jersey, hangs a huge Trump 2024 banner from her balcony. She explains that her support stemmed from not liking how a Netflix show she had been watching normalized two men kissing. Buddy’s aimless younger brother, Butch, is now a doomsday prepper, living in a junkyard with a makeshift shooting range and bragging about storming the capital because “our institutions have been taken over by pedophiles.” Oy vey.
Of course, Bagge doesn’t only skewer the far right in Hate Revisited. For instance, Buddy catches up with his ex, Val, at a dinner party from hell, a running theme in the series. Val is a vocal leftist and Black Lives Matter supporter. However, though she lives in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle during the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest for George Floyd, she flew to Paris. Of course, Buddy bluntly points out that her righteous indignation is a little less impactful when she hightails it to live in the comfort and safety of Paris with her old boss while she left her black boyfriend, the enigmatic George Hamilton the Third, back in Seattle to live alone in the CHAZ through the pandemic.
For readers wanting to revisit the series who enjoy stories that are a little less topical, Bagge also provides black-and-white flashback sequences to the series popular ‘90s heyday. The original run of Hate had two distinct halves. The first 15 issues were in black-and-white, inked with a distinctive cross-hatch style reminiscent of underground comix legend Robert Crumb, and set in Seattle during the height of grunge. They followed Buddy’s misadventures managing a band, fighting with rowdy roommates, and struggling with juvenile relationships. The second half had much cleaner lines, courtesy of inker Jim Blanchard, and were set in New Jersey, juxtaposing full color, bombastic cartooning with much more mature themes like mental decline, death of elderly parents, messy breakups, and suicide.
Long-time fans of Hate get the best of both halves of the original series with Hate Revisited. The black-and-white flashbacks even allow Bagge to revive fan-favorite character Stinky, Buddy’s get-rich-quick-scheming “best friend” remembered mostly as the singer of Leonard & the Love Gods (although he was significantly more famous for affixing a plunger to his butt for his stage costume than his actual vocals). Though it is fun to revisit Stinky (we even get an origin story of how he first met Buddy by calling in a bomb threat to their high school so he could make a drug deal in the parking lot), Bagge’s biggest strength as a storyteller is his choice to age his characters; and the modern stories end up being significantly more interesting and fleshed-out than the flashbacks.
Last we saw Buddy in Hate Annual #9 from 2011, he was driving back across the country to Seattle with his preschooler son, Harold. In Hate Revisited, Harold is now out of high school, working in construction and preparing to buy property for the first time with an unhoused friend named Spam. Buddy notices some of the same unsavory qualities of his former friend Stinky in Spam, and he goes to the encampment where Spam is living to spy on him and make sure his son isn’t getting involved with a chaos agent like Stinky. Bagge maximizes the flashbacks sequences by giving us a reminder of the poor decisions of Buddy’s youth countered with the slightly wiser middle-aged behavior of Buddy today. Though it’s Lisa, formerly the series’ biggest wrecking ball, who shows the most genuine growth. In a flashback about how the couple first met, she suggests to Buddy that he should “stalk her home” because she had never experienced stalking before. Now she seems the most well-adjusted of Bagge’s motley crew of characters, with a sweet motherly love for Harold. Notably, she is the only character who goes to therapy in the series.
Though Bagge’s lines aren’t quite as strong as they were back in the ‘90s, he continues to prove his mastery of alternative comics with Hate Revisited through his brilliant comedic timing and his painfully truthful characterization. His characters are still hysterically entertaining after over 35 years in print because they’re inscrutable, often act like assholes, and serve as reflections of people we really know in our own lives. Much like Homer from The Simpsons, Buddy is also an imperfect series protagonist, a loveable loser who struggles with alcoholism and indiscretion but whose heart is mostly in the right place. He is also tactless, making him the perfect voice to satirize modern life and our current broken politics. Bagge has long used our political and social combustibility as comedic kindling to ignite Hate’s elastic, slapstick satire, and in Hate Revisited it is more pronounced than ever before. | Jon Osia Scorfina
You can find Hate Revisited at your local comic shop or at the Fantagraphics website
